Crazy idea to reform bad incentives in science: treat lab technicians and lab engineers (i.e. employees, usually with undergrad degrees but no PhD) more like scientists.
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For instance, universities could have an explicit path by which technicians and engineers who do exceptional work could be granted PhD's *for that work* retrospectively. Have a path by which a technician could ever work their way up to being a PI.
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There are far more people who want science careers than there are people who will ever head up a lab, and that in itself is normal and fine. Leadership roles are always rarer than individual-contributor roles.
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The problem is that if you go for a PhD, the ultimate nominal goal is to become academic faculty, which in the experimental sciences means being the PI of a lab. Obviously, few PhD students ever will. But afaik the majority *aren't* tracked into full-time support/tech roles.
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Meanwhile, experimental science needs a LOT of engineering and technical work. Building and fixing lab apparatus, actually running experiments, caring for lab animals, writing code. And PI's complain about how hard it is to find good lab techs!
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And there's a shortage of laboratory-specialized skilled labor; for instance, the art of blowing custom lab glassware is dying out.https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassblower-20160613-snap-story.html …
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Not to mention the obvious problem that academic code is famously bad, because most of it is written by students, not by software engineers. (Standards are rising in many fields, but when I was in grad school for math in 2015, version control was still unknown.)
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I don't know if this is true for everyone, but sometimes I get the impression of a weird class/prestige thing where PhDs are "scientists" and lab technicians are not. Despite the fact that technicians often earn co-authorship and that PhD students do a lot of "grunt work."
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If a software company had most of its code written by unpaid interns, whose official primary task was to apply for being managers, and the handful of actual full-time software engineers were treated like second-class citizens...we'd think that was pretty dysfunctional.
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De facto science nowadays seems to be run as if the goal were simply to maximize headcount, regardless of whether the heads are doing anything, and regardless of their being miserable. (Probably this is too cynical.)
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